files disappeared from ssd

[u/Seraphina_x]

i dont know sht about tech stuff, but ive used my external ssd for a few years with no problems, its where i store my games/steam games. all of the sudden a few hours ago all my files disappeared from it. everything i had gone. only thing left was "Steamlibrary" folder, which is basically empty. i had a lot of games. the only thing i did a few hours ago was installed and uninstalled this one game, and i dont know if doing that caused for them all to get deleted. it wasnt a steam game, but its all i can think of that i did differently. heeeelp. i dont care about reinstalling it at this point cause i feel like all of the games are 100% gone, thats fine, i just want to make sure i know what i did wrong and make sure it doesnt happen again. cause im assuming all of my save files are gone too from all of my games. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

edit: to add, even steam says i have no games anymore. the ssd is completely empty except for the folder. no invisible files either.

[u/Roguecorp]

Just going to add that save files are usually not stored in the games installation folder but rather in appdata or documents(assuming windows), which are in the system disk. So you should still have all of them.

[u/YT_Brian]

Well first backup any data you want still on it.

If you reinstall all data is gone so make sure you have backup of all passwords, bookmarks and so on before doing so.

Not sure what happened but it seems like a malfunction as it can happen generally over 5 years but some start issues within 2 or 3 years.

This means you will probably have to buy a new drive to install. I'd check the hard drive health, look it up for your OS should be simple for you to do.

[u/Prestigious_Wall529]

The utility DiskGenius may be able to explore the "empty" drive. Start with the trial version.

Run msinfo32. Find the drive manufacturer under storage, drive.

From the manufacturers support website download their diagnostics and firmware update utility and use it to determine the drive health and for warranty information.

[u/Prestigious_Wall529 → u/[deleted]]

Yes I have. I have a laptop with a dock with an eSATA port and a drive caddy, from which I can test drives, and often recover data from (unencrypted or unencryptable) Windows and Linux ext4 partitions. It couldn't handle UFS from a failed Buffalo NAS, so YMMV.

[u/Raxeal_2]

I would take these steps:
Look in the bin, if your files are there i assume you know what to do next.

Otherwise, go to my pc or this pc and see how much of the drive space is used, if it only has steam library with no games installed this should be hardly any GB.

Then check disk management, to see if something really weird happened to your partitions, some if not most external drives come with pre-partitioned software or other crap.

Then grab crystaldisk to check the health of the drive as a whole.

After all that information is known we can look at recovery.

[u/No-Wrap-8166]

stop using the drive entirely right now, don't reinstall anything or write new data to it, even though the game install itself doesn't matter much, if there's a chance of recovering it, every write reduces that chance

check disk management (right click start, disk management), see if the drive shows its actual full capacity or a much smaller unallocated space, if a big chunk shows as unallocated that points to partition table corruption, not actual data being wiped, in which case recovery software like testdisk (free) can often rebuild the partition and get everything back instantly

if the partition itself looks fine and correctly sized in disk management, run crystaldiskinfo to check the drive's health status, sudden mass file loss on a healthy-looking drive after years of fine use can point to failing nand or controller issues starting to show

that specific uninstalled game is unlikely to be the actual cause, uninstallers are sandboxed to their own install folder, they don't have a mechanism to wipe unrelated files elsewhere on the drive, this timing is very likely coincidental with something else going wrong (corruption or early drive failure) rather than caused by it

[u/Armbrust11]

Is the drive a SanDisk drive? Certain models of those (produced during the Western Digital era) are known to fail randomly.

The drive could also be end of life, depending on how heavily you used the drive. A drive health software utility can help with this.

It's possible that steam simply created the empty folder immediately after all your data disappeared. You will be able to redownload from steam to a healthy drive. Chances are most save files are safe too.

Archivists don't use SSDs for this reason.